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Listening to Our Users

We’ve just launched a new team here at Everlaw: User Advocacy! Our newly-minted user advocates:

Gather feedback from users to inform our product development and delivery.

Interpret data about various aspects of product usage to help improve interfaces.

Create and iterate learning and help materials to support users and to help them have an optimal experience while using Everlaw’s litigation platform.

Having a team dedicated exclusively to user advocacy is a testament to our long-standing commitment to a user-centered product. We’re excited to devote significant resources to improving user engagement and success because we know it’ll result in a better product and happier customers. Importantly, our efforts focus on the experience of all users. Development priorities can often become disproportionately influenced by needs of people who don’t spend much time in ediscovery platforms, but are important to the sales process. Our goal is to ensure that all users have a voice and that the product evolves in a way that reflects a more balanced and holistic sense of user needs and priorities. This requires empathy, respect for users, and a belief in process, features that happen to be integral to modern design practice as well.

We’ve written a bit about the importance of design in legal technology. The growing emphasis on design in modern business practices reflects not just the increased attention given to aesthetics, but also changing theories about the relationship between firms and their customers. Much like how Taylorism was central to the ethos and operation of industrial firms, design is central to the ethos and operation of modern service and technology firms.

Many people still have the impression that design is fundamentally about visuals and aesthetics. The reality is that modern design practice is much more comprehensive and expansive. The core of any design practice is a humanistic reflex to put people at the center, and to give these human beings, whether they be users, employees, or other stakeholders, a voice in organizational design-making processes.

Unlike Taylorism, then, organizations that follow design principles don’t treat “human resources” as just another input that needs to be optimized, or customers as yet another managed input into the production machine.